Alfresco, the open platform for social content management, today announced the release of Alfresco Community 4, the most significant release of the platform to date. Alfresco 4 features a wealth of new user features and UI enhancements that enable faster user adoption, along with improved tools to allow developers to create social and cloud-scale, content-rich applications.

“Alfresco 4 is the result of a collaboration with our 2,200+ enterprise customers and 250+ global SI partners to create the most robust and extensible platform for a new generation of cloud-scale content apps,” said John Newton, CTO of Alfresco. “We have made dramatic improvements in Alfresco’s ability to scale and perform, while making it easier for developers to customize and extend the platform.”

Alfresco Community 4 can be downloaded now for development and testing here.

The announcement is being made in conjunction with Alfresco’s exhibit at JavaOne, the annual Java developer conference in San Francisco on October 2nd through 6th.

Cloud-Scale Performance

Alfresco Community 4 significantly increases overall system performance. New features that enable cloud-scale deployments include:

Integrated workflow – Automate content-focused business processes with Activiti, the leading open source Java-based BPMN 2.0 business process server

Enhanced clustering – Alfresco clustering has been enhanced to increase reliability and scalability, including added support for clustered CIFS

First Open Platform For Social Channel Publishing

Alfresco 4 includes a new, extensible service to publish content and status updates to social sites, including YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr and SlideShare. Integrated social processing enables:

Simpler Process – Social content publishing is now part of an enterprise content workflow, vastly simplifying the problem of multi-channel publishing. Control publishing with existing review-and-approve workflows and built-in content security.

Fewer Tools & Fewer Errors – By embedding social publishing into a company’s core content and collaboration tool, it reduces the need for social-specific tools and error-prone “copy-and-paste” to external tools.

Consumer-Like User Experience Drives Greater Adoption

Alfresco 4 offers a streamlined, simpler consumer-like experience for end users, leading to higher adoption. New features aimed at making users more productive include:

Cloud Collaboration - Use Google Docs integration to collaborate in real time

Mobile Support – New, free iOS apps available now from iTunes, along with continued support for WebDAV and CMIS standards for new mobile use cases

Extensibility – For developers and partners, Alfresco’s web interface is now much easier to extend and customize

For developers eager to learn more about the power of Alfresco 4, Alfresco is hosting its 2nd annual Alfresco DevCon 2011 event in San Diego, CA, on October 25th through 27th, and in London on November 8th through 10th.

About Alfresco
Alfresco is the open platform for social content management. With over 2,220 customers in 55 countries, Alfresco is the world’s most trusted open platform for highly scalable, enterprise-class content management. Boasting over 250 partners, a vibrant open source community, and customers including Home Depot, Michelin and the New York Philharmonic, the Alfresco ecosystem is driving innovation across the globe.